Evenflo has issued a major safety recall affecting over 324,000 Revolve360 Slim car seats across the U.S. and Canada.
When mechanical engineer Kevin Macliver welcomed his fourth child in 1995, he should have been celebrating. Instead, he found himself staring at two seven-seater vehicles in his driveway and realizing he’d been sold a lie.
The promise of family-friendly transport had turned into a nightmare of compromises. Children strapped into the boot’s crumple zone. Middle-row passengers who couldn’t be reached without musical-chairs maneuvers. Vehicles that guzzled fuel, cost a fortune in tax and insurance, and drove like delivery vans. And ironically, despite their size, there was no boot space left for actual family life.
For most parents, this would have been the end of the story—a resigned acceptance that large families simply can’t have nice things. But Kevin Macliver wasn’t most parents. He was an engineer who’d spent his career solving other companies’ impossible problems. And he was about to spend the next thirteen years solving his own.
The insight was deceptively simple. Any car designed to seat three adults across the back should have enough width for four children. The solution wasn’t a bigger car—it was a smarter seat.
While friends and family questioned his sanity, Macliver began designing what would become the first Multimac. Drawing on his metalworking contacts and deep knowledge of automotive safety, he created prototypes and launched into rigorous testing at BSI, fitting it around his day job.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. While regulators deliberated and skeptics doubted, his own four children rode safely in the prototype Multimac every single day. The testing would prove what he already knew—this seat worked.
On November 11, 1999, the Multimac passed its crash test spectacularly. Four dummies—representing a ten-year-old, six-year-old, three-year-old, and nine-month-old—sat in deliberately lopsided arrangement. Every measurement came back well within safety limits.
Then came the crushing blow: BSI refused approval.
The problem? Macliver had “modified” the test rig by adding a floor. The regulation was an 87-page document that didn’t mention whether the test rig should have a floor. BSI argued that since it didn’t explicitly say there could be a floor, there shouldn’t be one. Macliver countered that since every car actually has a floor, testing without one made no sense. The Multimac’s innovative support legs—now commonplace in car seats but revolutionary then—needed something to rest on.
What followed were two years of bureaucratic limbo. Meetings with VCA, TRL, BSI, and eventually the European Parliament. Finally, recognition came: a multiple child seat was indeed a useful invention. Testing would continue in Sweden, the home of child safety, where the test rig already included a floor and where innovation was welcomed rather than feared.
But there was a catch. By the time Swedish testing began, the regulation had evolved from ECE44-03 to ECE44-04, requiring design modifications. And unlike conventional car seats tested with a single dummy for one age range, the Multimac could accommodate anything from one newborn to four twelve-year-olds—over 4,000 possible combinations.
The regulators determined that eleven crash tests would be needed to cover all worst-case scenarios. Each time any detail changed, all eleven tests had to be repeated.
While typical manufacturers might spend a couple of hours testing a single two-hundred-pound seat, Macliver had to rent Swedish facilities for entire weeks, destroying eleven fifteen-hundred-pound prototypes in eleven one-thousand-pound tests. The facility only had two twelve-year-old crash test dummies—they had to rent two more each time he visited.
In Sweden, Macliver developed additional patented innovations: energy-absorbing legs and the “Adjustamac” instantly adjustable belt height system. The crash test results were so impressive that testers questioned their own instrumentation. “It can’t be that good,” they said. “Do the test again.” The second test matched the first.
At the end of 2008, after thirteen years and £750,000 of largely self-funded development, the Multimac received full approval. The timing was spectacularly unfortunate—launching into a global economic crisis. British banks, despite 100,000 families having a third child every year, couldn’t see the market.
But the families themselves could. Orders came from across the social spectrum and around the world, for everything from twenty-year-old hatchbacks to Bentleys and Porsches. Parents who wanted to keep the cars they loved. Families who refused to compromise on safety or style. People who understood that the solution to growing families wasn’t necessarily growing cars.
Today, two of Macliver’s daughters—who grew up riding in those prototype Multimacs—work for the company. The product that regulators initially refused to approve has become a global solution for families who want both safety and choice.
The story of Multimac isn’t just about engineering innovation or regulatory perseverance, though it’s certainly both. It’s about a father who refused to accept that keeping his children safe meant sacrificing everything else his family valued. It’s about the thirteen-year gap between a good idea and approval, and the determination required to bridge it.
Most of all, it’s a reminder that sometimes the best solutions come from the people actually living with the problems—and that those solutions are worth fighting for, even when the fight takes thirteen years, £750,000, and twenty-two crash test dummies borrowed from Sweden.
Because in the end, every family deserves to travel together safely, in a car they actually want to drive.
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